The Web (35 page)
Chapter
40
A few days later, on the plane back to L.A., it hit me.
First-class flight, seats like club chairs,
the Defense Department’s generosity allowing Spike’s crate a
seat of its own.
Dinner had been salmon stuffed with sole mousse. I’d
indulged in half a bottle of Chablis and fallen asleep.
Robin had finished only a third of a glass, but she’d
drifted off too. Now her head was heavy on my blanketed
shoulder.
Sweet sleep, but I came out of it thinking about
Haygood—who he’d been as a child. Was there a mother out there
who’d mourn him?
Stupid thoughts, but inevitable. I tried to shake
myself out of it, thinking of the good I’d been part of.
Ben freed. Some limited hope for Aruk.
The “kids” liberated and well cared for.
Moreland hospitalized, too, and evaluated. No
Alzheimer’s, no obscure neurological disease, just an exhausted old
man.
I’d visited him an hour before we left. He hadn’t told
Pam or Dennis yet.
Holding back. His entire life, after the paradise
needle, a struggle against impulse.
Heroism thrust upon him, he’d reinvented
himself.
A
thirty-year transformation, from a cruel womanizer to the patron saint
of Aruk.
But yet he felt guilty.
Other sins?
Things for which there was no atonement?
As I’d left his hospital room, he’d called out, “Time
deceives.”
The same thing he’d told me as
he bled on the white couch.
Another confession?
Is there anything else you need
to know?
Cold hands . . . still afraid.
Not unless there’s something else you want to tell
me.
A long silence before he’d closed his eyes and mumbled.
Terrible things. . . . Time
deceives.
Offering himself to me—defenses down, his world
unraveling.
The first time, I’d comforted him instead of pursuing
it. The second time, I’d just kept walking.
Not wanting to know?
Terrible things.
Time’s deceit.
His unique
brand
of deceit. Presenting a veiled truth
while changing time and context.
Telling me about cannibal cargo cults because he
suspected AnneMarie’s death had been part of a money-driven
conspiracy.
Recounting the nuclear blast because he’d been part of
another technological horror.
Discussing Joseph Cristobal’s vision and “A. Tutalo”
because he yearned to unload the secret of his kids.
And something else.
The first case he’d discussed with me, moments after we’d met.
Discussing in great detail, but unable to locate the
file.
Because there’d never been a file?
The catwoman.
A “lovely lady . . . sweet
nature . . . clean habits.” Thirty years old,
her mother was morose . . .
Abused and humiliated by a philandering husband—forced
to watch him make love to another woman.
The husband dead, years later. Eaten away by lung
cancer.
A ravaged chest . . .
I’m all right, kitten.
Kitten, kitten . . . I used to call her that
when she was little.
Pam not remembering.
Sent away too young to remember anything.
But
Moreland
remembered everything.
He’d exiled her to the best schools, turned her into an
orphan who’d become a woman demeaned by men.
Marrying a philandering abuser. Turning off sexually.
Humiliated . . . had she, too, watched her
husband rut with a lover?
Those sad eyes. Driven to depression. To the brink of
suicide, she’d admitted to Robin.
So fragile, her therapist searched for family support,
located and phoned Moreland.
To Pam’s surprise, he flew to Philadelphia. Offered a
shoulder to cry on—and more?
Had she told him the details of the humiliation?
Or had he assigned one of his lawyers to find out the
facts?
Little kitten . . . pouring her heart out to
Daddy.
The truth torturing Daddy. Because of his guilt about
sending her away.
Guilt about having once been exactly the kind of
man who hurt her.
A few days later, the philandering husband dies in a
freak accident.
Falling barbell.
Ravaged chest.
And “kitten” returns to her birthplace.
Is there anything else you need to know?
Not unless there’s something else you want to tell me.
Had Moreland stalked the young surgeon? Or had he hired
someone to make things right? He was a wealthy man with the
means to arrange things. The obsessive’s talent for
rationalizing extreme measures . . .
The barbell hovering over that arrogant
chest . . .
The man who’d hurt his “kitten” so deeply.
Or maybe it
had
been an accident and I was letting
things get away from me.
Terrible things,
he’d said.
Had to be . . .
I’d never know.
Did I care?
At that moment, I did. Maybe one day I wouldn’t.
Robin’s breath reached my nostrils, hot, tinged with
coffee and wine.
A pretty, dark-haired flight attendant smiled as she walked
down the aisle.
“Comfy, doctor?”
“Fine, thanks.”
“Going home?”
“Yup.”
“Well, that’s nice—unless you’d rather still be on
vacation.”
“No,” I said. “I’m ready to get back to reality.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J
ONATHAN
K
ELLERMAN,
America’s premier author of
psychological suspense, turned from a distinguished career in child
psychology to writing fiction full-time. His works include
previous Alex Delaware books
—When the Bough
Breaks, Blood Test, Over the Edge, Silent Partner, Time Bomb,
Private Eyes, Devil’s Waltz, Bad Love,
and
Self-Defense—
as well as the
thriller
The Butcher’s Theater,
two volumes of psychology,
and two children’s books,
Daddy, Daddy, Can You Touch the
Sky?
and
Jonathan Kellerman’s ABC of Weird Creatures.
He and his wife, the novelist Faye Kellerman, have four
children.
B
OOKS BY
J
ONATHAN
K
ELLERMAN
FICTION:
Billy Straight
(1998)
Survival of the Fittest
(1997)
The Clinic
(1997)
The Web
(1996)
Self-Defense
(1995)
Bad Love
(1994)
Devil’s Waltz
(1993)
Private Eyes
(1992)
Time Bomb
(1990)
Silent Partner
(1989)
The Butcher’s Theater
(1988)
Over the Edge
(1987)
Blood Test
(1986)
When the Bough Breaks
(1985)
NONFICTION:
Helping the Fearful Child
(1981)
Psychological Aspects of Childhood Cancer
(1980)
FOR CHILDREN, WRITTEN AND ILLUSTRATED:
Jonathan Kellerman’s ABC of Weird Creatures
(1995)
Daddy, Daddy, Can You Touch the Sky?
(1994)
Read on for an excerpt from
VICTIMS
by Jonathan Kellerman
Published by Ballantine Books
1
T
his one was different.
The first hint was Milo’s tight-voiced eight
A.M.
message, stripped of details.
Something I need you to see, Alex. Here’s the address
.
An hour later, I was showing I.D. to the uniform guarding the tape. He winced. “Up there, Doctor.” Pointing to the second story of a sky-blue duplex trimmed in chocolate-brown, he dropped a hand to his Sam Browne belt, as if ready for self-defense.
Nice older building, the classic Cal-Spanish architecture, but the color was wrong. So was the silence of the street, sawhorsed at both ends. Three squad cars and a liver-colored LTD were parked haphazardly across the asphalt. No crime lab vans or coroner’s vehicles had arrived, yet.
I said, “Bad?”
The uniform said, “There’s probably a better word for it but that works.”
Milo stood on the landing outside the door doing nothing.
No cigar-smoking or jotting in his pad or grumbling orders. Feet planted, arms at his sides, he stared at some faraway galaxy.
His blue nylon windbreaker bounced sunlight at strange angles. His black hair was limp, his pitted face the color and texture of cottage cheese past its prime. A white shirt had wrinkled to crepe. Wheat-colored cords had slipped beneath his paunch. His tie was a sad shred of poly.
He looked as if he’d dressed wearing a blindfold.
As I climbed the stairs, he didn’t acknowledge me.
When I was six feet away, he said, “You’ve made good time.”
“Easy traffic.”
“Sorry,” he said.
“For what?”
“Including you,” He handed me gloves and paper booties.
I held the door for him. He stayed outside.
The woman was at the rear of the apartment’s front room, flat on her back. The kitchen behind her was empty, counters bare, an old avocado-colored fridge free of photos or magnets or mementos.
Two doors to the left were shut and yellow-taped. I took that as a
Keep Out
. Drapes were drawn over every window. Fluorescent lighting in the kitchen supplied a nasty pseudo-dawn.
The woman’s head was twisted sharply to the right. A swollen tongue hung between slack, bloated lips.
Limp neck. A grotesque position some coroner might label “incompatible with life.”
Big woman, broad at the shoulders and the hips. Late fifties to early sixties, with an aggressive chin and short, coarse gray hair. Brown sweatpants covered her below the waist. Her feet were bare. Unpolished toenails were clipped short. Grubby soles said bare feet at home was the default.
Above the waistband of the sweats was what remained of a bare torso. Her abdomen had been sliced horizontally below the navel in a crude approximation of a C-section. A vertical slit crossed the lateral incision at the center, creating a star-shaped wound.
The damage brought to mind one of those hard-rubber change purses that relies on surface tension to protect the goodies. Squeeze to create a stellate opening, then reach in and scoop.
The yield from this receptacle was a necklace of intestines placed below the woman’s neckline and arranged like a fashionista’s puffy scarf. One end terminated at her right clavicle. Bilious streaks ran down her right breast and onto her rib cage. The rest of her viscera had been pulled out into a heap and left near her left hip.
The pile rested atop a once-white towel folded double. Below that was a larger maroon towel spread neatly. Four other expanses of terry cloth formed a makeshift tarp that shielded beige wall-to-wall carpeting from biochemical insult. The towels had been arranged precisely, edges overlapping evenly for about an inch. Near the woman’s right hip was a pale blue T-shirt, also folded. Spotless.
Doubling the white towel had succeeded in soaking up a good deal of body fluid, but some had leaked into the maroon under-layer. The smell would’ve been bad enough without the initial stages of decomp.
One of the towels beneath the body bore lettering. Silver bath sheet embroidered
Vita
in white.
Latin or Italian for “life.” Some monster’s notion of irony?
The intestines were green-brown splotched pink in spots, black in others. Matte finish to the casing, some puckering that said they’d been drying for a while. The apartment was cool, a good ten degrees below the pleasant spring weather outside. The rattle of a wheezy A.C. unit in one of the living room window was inescapable once I noticed it. Noisy apparatus, rusty at the bolts, but efficient enough to leach moisture from the air an slow down the rot.
But rot is inevitable and the woman’s color wasn’t anything you’d see outside a morgue.
Incompatible with life
.
I bent to inspect the wounds. Both slashes were confident swoops unmarred by obvious hesitation marks, shearing smoothly through layers of skin, subcutaneous fat, diaphragmatic muscle.
No abrasions around the genital area and surprisingly little blood for so much brutality. No spatter or spurt or castoff evidence of a struggle. All those towels; horribly compulsive.
Guesses filled my head with bad pictures.
Extremely sharp blade, probably not serrated. The neck-twist had killed her quickly and she’d been dead during the surgery, the ultimate anesthesia. The killer had stalked her with enough thoroughness to know he’d have her to himself for a while. Once attaining total control, he’d gone about choreographing: laying out the towels, tucking and aligning, achieving a pleasant symmetry. Then he’d laid her down, removed her T-shirt, careful to keep it clean.
Standing back, he’d inspected his prep work. Time for the blade.
Then the real fun: anatomical exploration.
Despite the butchery and the hideous set of her neck, she looked peaceful. For some reason, that made what had been done to her seem worse.
I scanned the rest of the room. No damage to the front door or any other sign of forced entry. Bare beige walls backed cheap upholstered furniture covered in a puckered ocher fabric that aped brocade but fell short. White ceramic beehive lamps looked as if they’d shatter under a finger-snap.
The dining area was set up with a card table and two folding chairs. A brown cardboard take-out pizza box sat on the table. Someone—probably Milo—had placed a yellow plastic evidence marker nearby. That made me take a closer look.
No brand name on the box, just
PIZZA!
in exuberant red cursive above the caricature of a portly mustachioed chef. Curls of smaller lettering swarmed around the chef’s fleshy grin.